"April the first, we're going to shut the door," said Terry Vincent of Woolford, Md.
The visa program at issue, known as H-2B, allows workers to enter the country for seasonal work outside of agriculture and then return home. Before bringing in a worker under this program, an employer must prove that no U.S. residents are willing to do the job.
The program has become more popular across the country in recent years and has been used to fill jobs from lawn care workers to lifeguards. It has become particularly valuable around the bay, where the process of removing crab and oyster meat from shells is still done largely by hand.
The work is unpleasant. Picking crabs, for instance, requires scraping off the cooked crab's gills, cleaning out its organs, breaking off the mouth and prying meat out of tiny cavities.
All that must be repeated up to 600 times a day, yielding a daily wage that might reach $120 on a good day, Brooks said. That amounts to 20 cents a crab. Adding to the undesirability in these jobs, experts say, is the fact that in recent years they have become seasonal because there no longer are enough shellfish in the polluted bay to sustain jobs year-round.
As a result, experts say, a once-large labor pool has vanished as local workers found better jobs.
"There's no one else," said Karen Oertel, of W.H. Harris Seafood House in Chester, Md. "Nobody shucks an oyster anymore."
The shellfish processors turned to the H-2B program, bringing in hundreds of Mexicans and other immigrants to spend several months in the plants. About 90 percent of Maryland's crabmeat is produced by plants that use H-2B workers, said Douglas Lipton, a professor of resource management at the University of Maryland.
But Chesapeake processors say a quirk of the program puts them at a disadvantage. The window for applications opens in October, but employers can apply no more than four months before they need workers. Seafood plants do not need help until April.
